Emigration studies have been a major historiographical concern for many years. This book addresses the significant but neglected issue of return migration to Britain and Europe since 1600. It offers some of the first studies of the phenomenon of returns. While emigration studies have become prominent in both scholarly and popular circles in recent years, return migration has remained comparatively under-researched. Despite evidence that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between a quarter and a third of all emigrants from many parts of Britain and Europe ultimately returned to their countries of origin. Emigrant homecomings analyses the motives, experiences and impact of these returning migrants in a wide range of locations over four hundred years, as well as examining the mechanisms and technologies which enabled their return. The book aims to open the debate by addressing some of the major issues in four thematic sections. After an overview of the process of return migration, it addresses the motives of those who returned from a wide variety of locations over a period ranging from the seventeenth century to the present day. The book looks at mechanisms of return, and considers the crucial question of the impact on the homeland of those who returned.

By 1914, when the popular song ‘Come back, Paddy
Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff’ was written and composed by Percy French, returnmigration
had long been a significant theme within the Irish diaspora. French, born in Cloonyquin,
County Roscommon, in 1854, had served, during the early 1880s, as Inspector of Loans to
Tenants with the County Cavan Board of Works before turning his attention on a fulltime basis
to the world of song, poetry and painting. Travelling around the Cavan countryside, he not
only met many of the

to
build, not least in a continental European context, where the phenomenon has attracted some
attention. 2 Returnmigration has been
incorporated into quantitative investigations, which chart the ebb and flow of movement on an
intercontinental scale, and sometimes into studies whose main focus has been on the outward
movement from specific countries. Dudley Baines in particular has demonstrated the
statistical impact of returners in the nineteenth century, when between a quarter and a third of all emigrants from Europe

emigrated between the 1870s and the First World War returned,
likely the highest percentage of all nationalities.’ Another historian of British
emigration writes that in 1889 the return rate was one in three. 4
The Finnish scholar Keijo Virtanen has done some of the most careful work in
taking apart returnmigration – finding, for example, that within Finland’s 20
per cent return rate, the urban return movement was tiny, often around 8 per cent; while in
one rural district almost 58 per cent of the emigrating farmers came back

As Mark Wyman has demonstrated, the subject of returnmigration is a vital component in the story of human mobility, but one which has begun to
attract the serious attention of scholars only in recent years. The focus of these studies
has included topics as varied as emigrant return to Finland between 1860 and 1930, the return
of Jews to Austria after the Second World War and the homeward migration of the Surinamese
labour force from The Netherlands. 1 Other
studies include returnmigration to Finland from Sweden

exponentially.
The resulting studies consider a broad range of issues, including the roles
played by Scots in foreign countries and the importance of the links that
they maintained (or did not maintain) with their homeland. Even more
recently, ‘returnmigration’ has received close scrutiny, as the experiences
of migrants who settled permanently are compared with those who moved
abroad temporarily and later returned home.3 Initially, scholarship on the
Scots abroad concentrated on Protestant, northern European destinations,4
but the Scottish presence in the Catholic sphere

Homesickness, longing and the return of British post-war immigrants from Australia

Alistair Thomson

polarized explanations for return offered by contemporary
critics in both Britain and Australia, and shows how a life history approach can offer a more
complex and nuanced set of explanations of returnmigration. In particular, the chapter
focuses on the nature, meaning and significance of ‘homesickness’ in the migrant
experience.
The argument is informed by analysis of three sets of life history sources.
Most important is an archive at the University of Sussex. Funding from the Arts and
Humanities Research Board has

This part of the book comprises two chapters which
offer long-term overviews of the process of returnmigration, from a European and Irish
perspective respectively. Mark Wyman’s analysis is concerned with the best-known and
most extensively documented place which return migrants left, the United States, and
highlights the range of reasons for return, the characteristics of those who came back and
the effect of their overseas sojourning on their homeland. Patrick Fitzgerald focuses on
Ireland, one of the locations

Intercontinental mobility and migrant expectations in the nineteenth century

Eric Richards

often keen to buy assets, especially land.
The breakthrough in attracting private emigrants was the expansion of pastoralism in the
1830s (many of whose practitioners were Scots) and most explosively in the Gold Rushes of the
1850s. Almost half the private emigrants of the entire nineteenth century arrived in the
single decade of the 1850s.
The composition and proportions of these inflows are significant for the
question of returnmigration. About 1.6 million people arrived in Australia, almost but not
quite

flows in terms of origin,2 skills3 and visa entry category.4 This,
coupled with reduced flows from Ireland, mortality among pre- and early
post-war Irish immigrants and returnmigration reduced the Ireland-born
share of Australia’s multicultural society to current low levels.
Groups like the Irish enjoy greater privilege than their fellow culturally
and linguistically diverse immigrant contemporaries because ‘Anglo-ness [in
Australia] remains the most valued of all cultural capitals in the field of
Whiteness’ (Hage, 1998: 191). Australia’s former ‘White Australia